Lot 607 D

Sicily-born Carla Accardi is one of the most significant representatives of abstract art in Italy. Before moving to Rome in 1946, she studied at the Universities of Palermo and Florence. This is where she began to experiment more artistically. She joined an avant-garde circle of artists and was counted among the founding members of the group 'Forma 1' in 1947, to which Piero Dorazia, among others, also pertained. Based on compositions in which geometric forms interlink, in the following years, Accardi experimented with the merging of geometric abstraction and gestural painting. To this end, at the beginning of the 1950s she introduced symbols reminiscent of calligraphy; in the meantime, she reduced her colour palette to black and white. A special feature of her oeuvre was the application of transparent plastic foil, so-called 'Sicofoil', as a painting ground with which she worked from the 1960s onwards. Sometimes, she used only the foil, sometimes she combined it with canvas in order to achieve a multi-layered painting ground - this is also the case in the pure white 'Biancobianco' presented here, in which gently curved vertical symbols are formed into a two-line rhythm in a gestural-meditative manner.
On the meaning of gestural symbols within her work, the artist herself states: 'A symbol does not have a meaning on its own but merely exists in relation to other symbols, namely from the moment in which it forms a structure with them \[…]. When it discards its arbitrary elements, it obtains an overall magical and profound significance of genuine necessity and yet also of an accidental (and ambiguous), playful character.' (Carla Accardi, as cited by: Am Horizont des Sehens, exhib.cat. Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst Wien, Vienna 1998, p.54)